Hadid suffered a heart attack earlier today, following treatment for bronchitis at a Miami hospital. One of the most prominent and successful female architects in the world, she has won countless awards and accolades for her contribution to architecture.

A graduate of London's Architectural Association in 1977, she worked with former professors Rem Koolhaas and Elia Zenghelis at OMA, before establishing London-based Zaha Hadid Architects in 1979, which she ran with Patrik Schumacher.

Evelyn Grace Academy, London, 2010

Her use of unusual shapes became apparent in early competition proposals for The Peak terminus in Hong Kong (1983), the Kurfürstendamm in Berlin (1986), and the Cardiff Bay Opera House in Wales (1994).

But it was the 1993 Vitra Fire Station in Weil Am Rhein, Germany – her first major built project – that thrust Hadid into the spotlight. Although the building was deemed unsuitable by users, its angled concrete walls and sharply pointed portico gained attention from critics and launched her career.

Hadid's work with concrete continued with projects such as Innsbruck's Bergisel Ski Jump (2002) and Cincinnati's Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art (2003), which both demonstrated how she used the material to create irregular angular forms. In larger projects such as the BMW Central Building in Leipzig and Phaeno Science Centre in Wolfsburg, both completed in 2005, Hadid was able to further experiment with concrete's sculptural capabilities – introducing dramatic curves to the angled structural elements, ceilings and window shapes.

As Hadid's career advanced, projects continued to grow in size and budget, and her use of curves and sinuous shapes became even more ambitious.

Olympic Aquatics Centre, London, 2012

The MAXXI museum in Rome, one of her most critically acclaimed projects, features black staircases and light fixtures that snake through the strips of structure. The building won Hadid the Stirling Prize in 2010, and she accepted Britain's most important architecture award again the following year for the Evelyn Grace Academy in London.

Hadid, along with Schumacher, was a champion of Parametricism, which relies on algorithms to dictate the shapes of digital models that become architectural forms. Their firm used this technique to design buildings including the 2014 Dongdaemun Design Plaza in Seoul.

Among Hadid's most important recent works is the Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku, Azerbaijan. Doubts surround the ethics of the project, but the impact of the building's sculptural skin rising from the ground into giant waves is unquestionable.

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